Service personnel employed by the telephone companies for handling the installation, testing, maintenance and repair of telephone equipment include supervisory/task assignment personnel at a control facility (e.g. central office), and mobile field service technicians (craftspersons) who carry out their assigned task assignments under the direction of a dispatcher at the central office. Over the years a typical work day of a field craftsperson begins with the technician driving to the central office to pick up the day's assignments and then travelling to various job sites identified on a work schedule. At the job sites the service technician employs equipment that interfaces with the telephone line for testing the operation and capability of communications circuits and for calling the central office for task assignment information from the dispatcher.
With the decentralization of the telephone industry into a plurality of local operating companies, there has been a reduction in service personnel, particularly at central office facilities, as the local companies have continued to incorporate automated equipment for monitoring and controlling network operations. As a consequence of this reduction in personnel, when a service technician at a remote job site needs to communicate with control personnel at the central office, the service technician must often wait for service (typically for a period of time on the order of fifteen minutes or more), thereby delaying the completion of that task and subsequent assignments for the day. Moreover, because the exchange of information between the service technician at the job site and the dispatcher at the central office is essentially a voice communication, the craftsperson must write job information by hand, in the course of the conversation with the central office dispatcher, thereby making the communication both labor intensive and time (and therefore revenue) consuming.